China on Film

China on Film is a kaleidoscope of history, film, politics, and personalities that scans a tumultuous landscape across nearly a hundred years. The range is marvelous. We consider overarching questions, but they are always brought to life in charming, concrete detail. We meet some major figures in culture and politics but bohemians and underground loners, too. We get our feet in Chinas earth but sense world currents as well. Our guide is a specialist insider, yet enough of an outsider that he can walk past taboos. As with any good kaleidoscope, this one sparkles at every turn. -- Perry Link, University of California, Riverside This collection of essays by one of our preeminent scholars of Chinese film history has given us a panoramic study of different facets of Chinese filmmaking and filmmakers: from early films made in 1920s Shanghai through each of the subsequent decades all the way to the sociopolitical dynamics of today's underground filmmaking. Each of the twelve chapters takes on a specific issue or theme and relates it to the historical context in which it arose. Altogether they form a cohesive framework and argument in which the author's passionate commitment to Chinese cinema and Chinese culture is felt on every page. -- Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Chinese University of Hong Kong This is the book on Chinese cinema that we have been waiting for. Few people have as deep and wide-ranging an understanding of Chinese film culture as Paul Pickowicz does. Admirably combining vigorous research and penetrating analysis, he provides us in this important book with an insightful, richly nuanced, and thought-provoking representation of the multivalent relations between popular cinema, social change, and political violence in Chinas recent history. Creatively organized around influential filmmakers, controversial films, or historiographical themes, and written in an engaging style, this is a must-read for anyone interested in twentieth-century Chinese culture and society. -- Fu Poshek, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Paul G. Pickowicz is Distinguished Professor of History and Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and inaugural holder of the UC San Diego Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History.

Introduction: The Sorrows and Joys of Chinese Filmmaking: Political and Personal Contexts Chapter 1: Shanghai Twenties: Early Chinese Cinematic Explorations of the Modern Marriage Chapter 2: The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s Chapter 3: Melodramatic Representation and the May Fourth Tradition of Chinese Cinema Chapter 4: Never-Ending Controversies: The Case of Remorse in Shanghai and Occupation-Era Chinese Filmmaking Chapter 5: Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of Chinas War of Resistance Chapter 6: Acting like Revolutionaries: Shi Hui, the Wenhua Studio, and Private-Sector Filmmaking, 19491952 Chapter 7: Zheng Junli, Complicity, and the Cultural History of Socialist China, 19491976 Chapter 8: The Limits of Cultural Thaw: Chinese Cinema in the Early 1960s Chapter 9: Popular Cinema and Political Thought in Early Post-Mao China: Reflections on Official Pronouncements, Film, and the Film Audience Chapter 10: On the Eve of Tiananmen: Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism Chapter 11: Velvet Prisons and the Political Economy of Chinese Filmmaking in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s Chapter 12: Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in Early-Twenty-First-Century China Additional Work on Chinese Cinema